Urs Fischer

Following the first staged burning of Francesco from March to November 2019, the sculpture will be recast by the artist's studio, returning to the National Gallery in December 2019 when it will be ignited for another slow-burn performance.

The practice of Swiss artist Urs Fischer is inimitable: a unique expression in an era of image saturation, yet in its diversity, one that resists easy classification. Fischer's sculptures engage with the ongoing problematics of the plastic arts—scale, perspective, surface—yet it is his provocative presentation of material to spark discussion that has carried his work to a global audience. Wax as a material is now iconic of Fischer's practice, as one that both forms his work and enables its cyclic ruination. Through an exhibited burning of his wax sculptures, Fischer presents this transformation as haunting alchemy; a staged disintegration of the body as poignant metaphor. 

Francesco 2017 is a portrait of the lauded Italian art curator Francesco Bonami. Standing on top of an open refrigerator stacked with fruit and vegetables, Bonami is depicted looking down at his smartphone—a pose emblematic of our contemporary era. Francesco represents one of Fischer's highly celebrated candle works. First created by the artist in 2001 as anonymous and crudely cut female forms, Fischer's recent wax figures are refined portraits of art world luminaries: Untitled (Rudolf Stingel) 2011, Standing Julian 2015 and Dasha 2018.

Memorable among Fischer's candle works is his Venice Biennale presentation of the double-figured Untitled 2011, depicting Giambologna's sixteenth-century Rape of the Sabine Women. Giambologna is known to have created figurative studies in wax, and two examples are preserved in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection, London. In idiosyncratic antithesis, Fischer instead prioritises expiration in his sculptures, and in doing so poses challenges to the art-historical and art-market expectations for permanence.

Whilst specific, the subject of Fischer's candle work holds less significance than its material concerns. As a sculpture set in a continuous cycle of melting and recasting, Francesco is ignited as a figurative portrait and extinguished as Anti-form abstraction. Over several months the constant heat of candle flame reduces the sculpture to a pile of debris. This exquisite metamorphosis from individual to indefinite, representation to reality, is a gradual process that evokes the grains of time sliding through an hourglass and stands as an allusion to life flickering for a mere moment in history.

Fischer selects wax as an energised medium: under a flame, the sculpture becomes animated. But with life also comes death, and it is as a memento mori (a reminder of mortality) that Fischer's sculpture reverberates. Whilst the life cycle of the sculpture begins anew with each re-casting, a gnawing loss pervades.

Born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1973, Fischer trained as a photographer at the Hochschule für Gestaltung. Since 1996, Fischer has held numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the northern hemisphere, with his first large-scale European solo 'Kir Royal' in 2004, and first American solo 'Urs Fischer. Marguerite de Ponty' in 2009. Fischer has since enjoyed a meteoric rise, and in 2018 he is feted as one of the art world's most exciting contemporary practitioners.

Jaklyn Babington

Senior Curator, Contemporary Art